A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Although Olga had continued to take lessons in Paris with Sonia Derloff, she would never dance again. This raises a number of questions whose answers we can only guess at. Had her injury not healed well enough? Or did the excessively possessive Picasso not want to relinquish control of her career to Diaghilev, or see her in the embraces of male partners? Or did it have to do with Picasso’s desperate desire for an heir? Since the artist had to wait until 1921 for a son, Olga may have postponed this event in the hope of resuming her career. The fact that she wrote in November of 1919 asking Clive Bell to send her the scores of Boutique fantasque and Les Femmes de bonne humeur suggests that she may not have given up this hope and needed to study an old role as well as a new one.22

  As for Picasso, he, too, preferred the anonymity of a hotel in the center of London to confinement chez Eugenia. Besides working on Tricorne, he was anxious to see the Elgin marbles and the tribal art in the British Museum, as well as the masterpieces in the National Gallery—all the more of a pleasure since the Louvre had not reopened since the war. He also looked forward to buying elegant new clothes in line with his elegant new image.

  Picasso and Olga arrived on May 25 and checked into Room 574 (now 536), one of several rooms that Diaghilev had booked at the Savoy Hotel.23 The impresario loved this grand hotel; it was close to the Alhambra Theatre and the Covent Garden Opera House; it also had a famously fashionable grill room, where patrons and performers gathered after the opera or the ballet, and where Diaghilev would give daily luncheons—occasions that delighted Olga and bored Picasso, who preferred to lunch at Gennaro’s trattoria in Soho. Diaghilev was too broke to treat himself or his stars to the Savoy’s more expensive suites, so far from having a view of the Thames, the Picasso’s room looked into an inner courtyard. Not that he was tempted, but he would never have been able to fulfill Rosenberg’s fatuous request of June 10, 1919: “There are some beautiful Thames-side subjects. You should do what Monet did, forty views of London, but no foggy ones. They would be a great success.”24 Given Picasso’s implacable stand against impressionism and Monet in particular—“trop flou” he used to say—Rosenberg of all people should have known better.25 However, his idea of portraying the same subject in different lights would bear fruit later in the year.

  Besides the sets for Tricorne, Diaghilev had another commission for Picasso: a drawing of Derain for the “souvenir” program of Boutique fantasque26 which was due to open on June 4, so the drawing had to be done in a hurry. Though formerly the closest of friends, the two artists had grown apart. The war had left the recently demobilized Derain very resentful of artists who had done well for themselves during the war while he and Braque had been stuck in the trenches. Rivalry and strained relations put Picasso on his mettle and resulted in a portrait of exceptional strength. Carefully modulated contours and partly erased pentiments convey a wonderfully weighty experience of the sitter’s massive frame.27 Inspiration for the Derain drawing did not come from Ingres—as it did in the drawings of Olga and Lopokova that date from this trip—but from Picasso’s own 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein,28 a painting that, ironically, Derain had borrowed from in the past.

  Picasso. Portrait of André Derain, 1919. Black pencil on paper, 39.9 x 30.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  The promotional efforts of Paul Guillaume and the Paris-based Swedish dealer Walter Halvorsen resulted in Derain being regarded as not only more of a money-spinner than Picasso but, in the opinion of André Lhote and others “le plus grand peintre vivant”29 (Two years later, Picasso would complain to Roger Fry of the prices—30,000 francs for a still life—that Derain’s work was fetching.)30 However, given Derain’s fluent English and his familiarity with London, the subject of some of his finest Fauve paintings, he would prove a useful companion to Picasso. Derain, who prided himself on his knowledge of the British Museum’s classical and ethnographical galleries, is likely to have accompanied Picasso on his visits there as well as to the National Gallery. And since Olga insisted on attending every ballet performance—a chore for Picasso, who preferred rehearsals—and Derain was on his own, the two of them were free to go out on the town together. Clive Bell, the art critic, had arranged for Derain to take over the flat that his wife, Vanessa, had recently rented and not yet moved into, and he spent as much time as he could with the two artists, reporting that le gros—that is, Derain (Picasso was le petit)—“each night fell in love with a new English girl [but] consoles himself playing the organ [that is to say, masturbating].”31 After the first night of Boutique, Derain returned to Paris but came back to London for the first night of Tricorne. His future wife,32 Alice, who had formerly been Picasso’s mistress, stayed away. She had taken against him.

  Picasso. Three Dancers (Khokhlova, Lopokova, Chernicheva), 1919-20. Pencil on three sheets of paper pasted together, after a publicity photograph. 37.5 x 32 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Diaghilev had yet another commission for Picasso: a portrait of Massine that the impresario had been nagging him to do ever since they first met. Since he had no studio in London and the room he shared with Olga was out of the question, Picasso was unable to paint the full-length canvas of Massine that Diaghilev had set his heart on. The dancer had to settle instead for a drawing—a flashy image contrived to please the narcissistic sitter and his besotted boss. Unlike Derain’s portrait, Mas-sine’s is a tour de force rather than a masterwork.33 The dancer would not have had to sit for it. Picasso worked from a publicity photograph as he did in the drawing he made around the same time of Diaghilev.34 This drawing is also flattering in that the impresario looks all the more debonair in his top hat and white tie, mischeviously contrasted with the potbellied, bowler-hatted, black-tied moneyman, Alfred Seligsberg, who worked for the company’s principal backer, Otto Kahn. When the drawing was reproduced in the first number of Léonce Rosenberg’s magazine, UEsprit Nouveau, its academicism and “show biz” subject caused as much controversy as Picasso’s Ingresque drawing of Max Jacob had caused four years earlier.

  In Rome, Picasso had had a studio, which enabled him to execute major paintings as well as work for the ballet. In London he was able to do little beyond Diaghilev’s commissions. However, his day-to-day involvement with the dancers inspired a series of masterly drawings done for his own pleasure, after publicity photographs of the ballerinas, including Olga, costumed for Les Papillons (1914) and Les Sylphides (1916).35 Their greatness resides in their affectionate mockery. Picasso singles out hands and other details for magnification, which gives us a new take on the stylization of classical ballet positions. He suggests that, for all the grace and beauty of romantic ballet, there is a flesh-and-blood physicality to these gossamer wraiths. These drawings pave the way for next year’s galumphing giantesses.

  To accommodate his scene painters, Vladimir and Elizabeth Violet Polunin,36 Diaghilev had rented an enormous studio on Floral Street opposite the stage door of the Covent Garden Opera House. The studio’s most prominent feature was a very tall ladder, which the Polunins and the set designer had to climb up and down whenever they needed to gauge the effect of their handiwork from a distance. And it was there, one day late in May, that Vladimir Polunin recalled how:

  Diaghilev came into the studio accompanied by a gentleman of medium height, southern complexion and wonderful eyes, whom he introduced to me as Pablo Picasso…. Picasso showed me the booklet-maquette of his scene for … Le Income, and we all began discussing the construction of the future setting.… [After] Bakst’s complicated and ostentatious scenery, the austere simplicity of Picasso’s drawing, with its total absence of unnecessary detail, the composition and unity of the colouring … was astounding. It was just as if one had spent a long time in a hot room and then passed into the fresh air.

  … Picasso came to the studio daily… gave his instructions regarding the drawing and requested us to preserve its individuality and pay special attention to the colouring. The drawing, despite its deviation from the usual perspective, was set down with mathematical pre
cision.

  … All this care was of the utmost importance, for the entire scene was based on the very clever combination of the four fundamental tones…. The colours appeared remarkably quiet and required the addition of zinc white, a proceeding which, in scenes of the Bakst type, would have been considered a crime; but Picasso maintained that this led to a general unity of tone.

  … Pure white was dulled by the addition of light chrome, which resulted in a tone having the beauty of old ivory. Picasso was invariably present at these experiments and though often accepting our advice, never departed in the slightest degree from the colour-key and construction he had evolved. His presence during the execution of the work gave a special charm to the joint solution of all questions.

  With him, there were never any of the doubts, alterations and variations so characteristic of “designers” of inferior calibre. … Different proposals and variations were discussed while deciding on the colours, but, once everything had been settled, the given tone was not altered on the canvas by a hair’s breadth.37

  The scene painting was finished within three weeks.38 In gratitude to Polunin, Picasso executed a particularly sympathetic portrait of him.39 Sacheverell Sitwell describes going to watch Picasso working on the central corrida section of the rideau de scène—an introductory curtain that is the pictoral equivalent of an overture. For broad effects he used a brush attached to a broom handle; for more detailed work, he used a toothbrush.

  Olga and Picasso in the scene painting studio, Floral Street, London, 1919. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Diaghilev and Massine were there, and Picasso, in carpet slippers and with a bottle of wine standing near him, was at work. The canvas lay stretched upon the floor, and Picasso was moving around at great speed over its surface (he wore carpet slippers for this purpose) walking with something of a skating motion. … I recall… thinking that this was the nearest that modern eyes would ever get to the spectacle of Tiepolo … at work.40

  Sitwell reports that Picasso intended the rideau de scène to evoke Goya’s tapestries. And it is true, the format resembles one of those eighteenth-century tapestries with an allegorical or historical scene set at the center of an area given over to swags, arabesques, and ornate borders.

  The maquette Polunin worked from has been lost; however, successive drawings for the central section indicate Picasso’s original intentions.41 Although the plot of Tricorne has nothing to do with bullfighting, Massine and Diaghilev decided that the subject of the curtain should be ultra-Spanish therefore tauromachic:42 the image of a picador being charged by a bull, framed at the sides by tiers of balconies occupied by Goyesque majas. At the bottom, serried rows of spectators are seated by the arena’s stylized steps. By enabling the people in the audience to identify with the figures on the stage and, in imagination, become part of the action, Picasso hoped to blur the frontier between stage and auditorium.

  Picasso’s most imaginative design for the curtain proved too polemical and un-Spanish for Diaghilev and Massine. On a gigantic trompe l’oeil easel, flanked by trompe l’oeil theater curtains, he proposed to set a cubist still life with a guitar against a representational view of the bullring.43 Once again, he was to demonstrate that cubism and classicism were two sides of the same coin. This version was predictably turned down. The final version was a compromise: as stylistically harmonious and unchallenging as a travel poster.44 Diaghilev loved it. Since no photograph of this curtain in its entirety has survived, little is known about the decorative border panels. All we have is a rough watercolor sketch,45 which indicates that each of the vertical areas to the right and left of the central scene consisted of a cubist guitar enclosed in a tall diamond-shaped border.46 The inspiration for these guitars was a seven-foot-tall papier collé, or rather papier épinglé, in the Museum of Modern Art that Picasso had executed a few months earlier, to judge by the date, February 11, 1919, on one of the bits of newspaper.

  Given all the research that Falla and Massine devoted to the folk music and dances for their “great Spanish ballet,” it is surprising that Picasso should have allowed himself to be talked into doing what Palau calls an espagnolade47 A ballet critic who has misidentified the figures in the Parade curtain claims that the swaggering majo in the cloak—a stock Spanish image reminiscent of advertisements for Tío Pepe—is a self-portrait; that the Goyesque majas represent Diaghilev in drag talking to Karsavina; and that the frisky boy selling pomegranates—a figure that Picasso had borrowed before from El Greco—was Idzikowski.48 The artist’s jokes are never that inane.

  The choice of Iberian pastiche over the original violent image of the bull charging the picador involved replacing the first act of the tauromachic drama with the last, anticlimactic moment—the arrastre, when horses drag the dead bull out of the ring. To counteract the left-to-right movement of the arrastre, Picasso introduced a right-to-left flight of the swallows; it looks contrived.

  After working on the curtain for over two weeks, Picasso asked Polunin to let him know when he “had achieved the most suitable result”:49 an unexpected request that confirms Picasso’s fear of overworking an idea. Alas, Polunin did not stop him in time. The corniness may have pleased the public, but it played into the hands of his artist’s modernist detractors.

  In desperate need of money in 1928, Diaghilev announced to Grigoriev, his regis-seur, that he had decided to sell the central section of the curtain:50

  “I’ve already got a buyer in Germany; and the money will enable me to do some new productions.” [Diaghilev] looked at me questioningly. I was sad at the idea of parting with the curtain for he Income, which I love, and said I feared we might be criticized for presenting the ballet without it. Diaghilev laughed. “Oh, in that case we’d say we were afraid it might get spoilt, if we went on using it,” he said, “and so we’d put it away. No, I must sell it. So will you please produce it… tomorrow? I’ll do the cutting out myself.” The “cutting out” he referred to was what made the sale of the Tricorne picture possible; for it had been painted as a comparatively small panel in the center of a huge cloth. Diaghilev would have liked also to sell Picasso’s curtain for Parade.… But the design in that case covered the whole expanse of [the cloth]; and no-one could be found to buy anything so vast.51

  Paul Rosenberg sold what was left of the curtain to one of his biggest clients, G. F. Reber, the German speculator who had invested much of his fortune in cubism.52 Twenty-five years later, Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe’s collaborator on the Seagram Building in New York, would acquire the curtain on behalf of the Bronfman family for installation in the foyer of their building’s Four Seasons restaurant, where it remains to this day.53

  Polunin’s statement that work on Tricorne “proceeded in a spirit of exultation” was especially true of the sublime drop curtain for the ballet itself.54 Its overarching bridge and mountainous backdrop were inspired by the hallowed months in 1898 and 1909 that Picasso had spent in Horta.55 The restraint of Picasso’s palette— ivory, gray, terracotta, and a faded blue for the sky—has been said to derive from Goya’s tapestries.56 Nonsense. These tapestries—above all the cartoons for them in the Prado, with which Picasso was more familiar—tend to be decorative and colorful, like the rideau de scène. Picasso’s colors for the drop curtain correspond exactly to the tonality of the sun-parched Aragonese highlands. Note the absence of anything green. Even the millstream and waterwheel, which are features of early sketches, have vanished; the bridge in the background is the only indication of the river, which is crucial to the ballet’s plot. For Picasso, Tricorne was a useful vi-trine for his emergent stylistic synthesis. By blending cubist and representational elements so subtly and easily, Picasso was able to demonstrate to a wider audience than ever before how alternative modes of notation could harmonize as well as set each other off.

  Picasso’s other major contribution to Tricorne, the costumes, have come to be seen, like the set, as the artist’s supreme theatrical achievement. Indeed, Rosenberg was so delighted with the
m that when he came over to London for the opening, he decided to have pochoirs (stencils) made of them, which he would publish in a portfolio the following year. Unfortunately, designs of individual beauty do not necessarily make for viable ensembles. So long as the Miller and his Wife were alone onstage, everything looked fine; but, as W. A. Propert, author of an early book (1921) about Diaghilev’s ballet company, pointed out,

  With the entry of the other characters one began to feel less at ease. The beauty began to fade with the insistence of those noisy dresses that never seemed to move with the wearers or assume the changing curves of their bodies that looked as if they were art in cardboard, harshly striped and rayed, with all their contours heavily outlined in black. One or two … might have been forgiven, but multiplied to ten or twenty, they became merely ugly57

  Propert was not alone in taking exception to the surfeit of stripes that recall the puppets’ costumes Picasso had seen in Rome. In the tiny Teatro dei Piccoli these stripes, which accentuate a costume’s folds and draperies, helped spectators to differentiate between the characters when seen from afar, but en masse and in constant movement on a crowded stage they made for confusion.

  Massine continued to perform the role of the Miller in front of Picasso’s backdrops until he was well into his sixties. As a junior ballet critic, circa 1950, I saw him dance Tricorne several times—with Margot Fonteyn and Moira Shearer, among others. Although he could no longer do Felix’s famous crash to the floor and leap to a sudden stop, which brought the farruca to a sensational finale and the audience to its feet, Massine still had a mesmerizing stage presence as well as an amazing ability to simulate Felix’s flamenco. But it is hard not to agree with that formidable classical ballet critic, André Levinson, that Massine used gesture and step to “translate the score note by note; movement was no longer significant or expressive, but purely dynamic and decorative.”58 In this respect, at least, Massine’s dancing was the antithesis of flamenco in that it was almost totally lacking in what Spaniards call “duende” and blues singers call “soul.”